Due South: Being Human
by Aconitum-Napellus
Summary: In the aftermath of a crash in which he couldn't save everyone, Benton has to realise he isn't Superman. He's only human, after all. Inspired by the Crash Test Dummies song Superman's Song. A very, very belated and poor piece of work to say thank you for a donation to a fundraiser.


'Fraser. Fraser.'

_Knock. Knock. Knock knock knock._

'Fraser. Hey, Benny.'

_Knock. Knock knock knock knock knock._

'Benny! Benton Fraser! Fraser, will you open the goddamn door?'

He sighed, looked at the dull ceiling, waited for the knocking to go away. Maybe it wouldn't go away. Ray was pretty persistent. Maybe that was one of the qualities Benton liked about him. He was persistent as hell, even when you didn't want him to be, over all the things that didn't, really, matter in his job. Persistent over friendship, over family loyalty, over going to exactly the right pizza place, over getting one over on his enemies, over making sure his hair was smoothed down perfectly before he stepped out of the door. He wasn't persistent about tracking, about looking for the small details, about standing back and really considering the facts of a case before rushing in. He had a different work method to Benton; a different work method to most of Benton's erstwhile colleagues. Everything was different down here. The crazy thing was that Ray thought he lived in the north. This north was nothing to Benton's crisp, empty, snow-draped north.

He chuckled, but he didn't let the sound out of his chest. Ray was persistent at being a good friend. That's why he was here now, hanging on the door, banging away over and over. Diefenbaker was looking at the door with his ears peaked up and his head on one side, and Benton wondered, not for the first time, exactly what he was sensing. Maybe he wasn't totally deaf. Maybe he could feel the vibrations. Likely as not he could smell Ray, even through the door. He used enough aftershave. That was another thing he was persistent about. Enough aftershave to sink a battlecruiser.

_Knock knock knock. Knock knock. Knock knock knock._

His knocking was inconsistent. Why not three sharp raps, a pause to hear if anyone was coming to the door, then three sharp raps again? Consistent, reliable. Ray didn't knock like that.

'Benny, I know you're in there!'

Ray's voice was a little muffled through the door, but Benton could tell that he was getting more annoyed.

'Will you just come to the door?'

Dief whined, and Benton looked at him.

'Don't start,' he mouthed, making sure the movements of his lips were clear and pronounced.

Dief settled back onto the floor with a soft grunt, his eyes flicking between the door and Benton on the bed. He turned his head on one side, making an enquiring look.

'I will feed you later,' Benton mouthed. 'Lat-er.'

Dief huffed.

Ray rapped again, then again in a rather more desultory way.

'Don't think you're fooling me, cos you're not fooling me,' he called through the door. 'I know you're in there and you know you're in there. Of course you know you're in there, because you're in there… Hell, Benny, will you just open the door? You know, I blew off a date just so I could walk up god knows how many flights of stairs and come and stand in this rat-infested hallway and shout through a door at you. A _date_, Benny, with a really hot – Ah, what do you care about women? You live like a damn monk anyway. Will you _let me in_?'

Benton met Dief's eyes and touched his finger to his lips in a simple signal which he knew Diefenbaker well understood. Dief whined though, and Benton shook his head in exasperation.

'You are the most ill mannered wolf I have ever met,' he mouthed.

Another couple of knocks, and then another three, and then, 'All right. All right, Benny. I'll leave you alone. Okay? I'll leave you alone. I promised Ma I'd pick her up a couple pounds of ground beef anyway, so I'll leave you alone. Maybe I can make my date after all. You know where I am and you know my number. Just call me? Okay?'

Benton waited, listening. Perhaps Ray had been telling the truth, because he heard his footsteps moving away along the hallway. He heard the first few steps on the stairs, before they faded into nothing.

He huffed out breath, hands resting on his chest, eyes on the ceiling.

Diefenbaker looked at him, then at the open window, and then he got up and jumped through onto the fire escape. Benton could hear the metallic tick of his claws on the steps as he made his way down.

'Traitor,' he murmured.

He rested his head back on the pillow, perfectly straight, so that he was looking at the ceiling again. He looked at all the little wrinkles in the paper up there that had been left by the paperers, or that perhaps had developed over time, with the damp that seeped in. Ray always got at him for leaving his window open but it was actually the best way to stop the place being damp. A lot of the mould that had been on the walls when he moved in had gone, thanks to the simple expedient of leaving a window open and letting the air circulate. More people could do with leaving their windows open.

He looked at the creases on the ceiling, and thought of the crease of the river that ran down between those two neighbourhoods. A little dyke on both sides to stop flood water washing over, like those two parallel creases right above his head. The brown flow of the water that was darker than the paper on his ceiling, but just as dull. There was a lot of water in the rivers this year. There had been a lot of rain.

The river was straight, like the creases above him. That was the problem with cities. People straightened out the rivers, and when they didn't straighten them they all out buried them. They took the soul out of rivers by doing that. They turned them into mindless, dead things. Then, when the flood waters swept down, there was nothing to stop it. The water caught up leaves and it caught up branches and sometimes it caught up whole tree trunks. In these places it caught up shopping carts and traffic cones and bicycles and whatever other trash people flung into the deep. In the deep past people threw coins and brooches and swords into waterways, and worshipped over them. There wasn't any worship in throwing a stolen bike or shopping cart into the water. Now they straightened them out and buried them and paved over all the land, and then the water ran straight into the rivers and once it was there it roared down the stream like a living beast, destroying everything in its path. Destroying that bridge…

It had all happened so fast, in some ways. In some ways it must have been fated for months, for years, even. There was a lot a person could do to avoid a future heart attack. There was a lot people could do to prevent flooding. But for years and years people had been neglecting and abusing the waterways, and for years and years, Benton guessed, that bus driver had been driving around all day and doing very little exercise, smoking on every break, and eating the way the Americans were famed to eat. He didn't blame the bus driver. Everyone had bad habits, and everyone lived differently. He didn't really blame the people who had been letting the river choke with rubbish and destroying its natural course. If he blamed anyone he blamed the builders of the bridge. And himself. Of course he blamed himself.

At least Dief hadn't been on board. That was a blessing. He had muttered all sorts of things about Dief when he had disappeared through the window that morning and gone off to roam the city streets alone. He had been worried about him being picked up by the dog warden. He had been thinking about that robbery in Chinatown. He had been worried about the old woman, Mrs Banaszewski, who he had been going to visit. He was sure that her son was stealing money from her, and he knew it was going to be hard finding a way to convince her of that, and harder still when she finally did believe him. He had been worrying about all those things, gazing out through the window of the bus, watching the raindrops hit and slide, hit and slide, so that everything on the other side was a blur. So he hadn't been talking to anyone. He had been sitting at the back, not near the driver. He hadn't noticed any of the signs of an incipient heart attack. The first thing that had alerted him had been a woman's scream.

'You're not Superman, Benny.'

Ray had said that to him not long after it happened, wrapping a blanket around his shoulders, around his soaking clothes. Someone had found his hat, and handed it to him, and he took it, saying, 'Thank you kindly,' without taking in the face of the person he was speaking to. He had put the hat on without even thinking, and water had cascaded down his face from inside it, but it hadn't really made a difference because he was so wet and the rain was coming down so hard.

'Come on. Better get you down to the hospital,' Ray had said, and he had shook his head. He really couldn't afford the co-pay from going to hospital.

'I'm fine, Ray,' he had said. 'I've swum in rivers colder than this. I'm absolutely fine.'

He had felt fine. Perhaps it was the adrenaline in his system. He had felt warm, almost hot, even though he was soaking wet and the temperature was hovering around freezing. It had been almost an hour before the shivering had begun, and by then he was back at the consulate in warm, dry clothes. He had stood through his shift after that without twitching a muscle, but standing there had not been good. It had allowed him to go over and over what had happened. He saw it all in flashes. He saw the face of the bus driver, the little signs in the tone of his skin that indicated he might not be well. He saw the faces of the passengers, the elderly couple three seats from the front, the mother with the toddler strapped into her pushchair, the teenage boy and girl with their heads together near the back, the man on his own eating peanuts from a plastic packet. There had been almost sixty people on that bus. He found he couldn't see all of their faces, but he could remember very, very many of them.

He had seen the man from the elderly couple afterwards, being wrapped in a blanket like the one around his own shoulders and led to an ambulance. He had dragged the elderly woman out and laid her on the bank and blown air into her lungs and pressed and pressed and pressed at her chest, but it hadn't done a thing. He had been forced to leave her, and dive in again, because there were so many people trapped down there. It was a terrible choice, a choice that had no right answer; should he attend to the people he pulled out, or try to save more lives? Should he focus on the old and vulnerable or the young who had more future to lose? A terrible choice.

It haunted him when he closed his eyes. He could hear that old woman's voice. He could hear the toddler in the pushchair, crying. He wasn't even sure how many he had pulled out, or how many of those survived. Other people had been there in the end, a youngster of about sixteen throwing off his jacket and shoes and diving in to help, a man in his fifties doing the same, a woman wading in through the soft mud at the edge and then slipping into the water and feeling blindly for whatever might have been down there. She was the one who had found that toddler, pulling her out still strapped into the chair, with a strength that Benton hadn't expected to see in a woman. She was the one who pressed her mouth to the toddler's blue lips, and breathed until the skin was pink again.

Maybe there was something in the uniform, in the bright red dress uniform, at least, that made a man feel like he should be able to do anything. Like he should be able to do everything. People invested such trust in a well cut suit of clothes, in brass buttons and shining leather. That was what Superman relied on, wasn't it? He didn't turn up to events in a half-buttoned shirt and ripped jeans. No matter what the crisis, he always took the time, however short that was to a super being, to present himself neatly, in a bright, easily recognisable uniform, with crisp, slicked hair.

But what was Superman when he was lying on the sofa at home, knocking back a beer and watching TV? He wasn't wearing his uniform then. He was wearing – Well, Benton had never really thought about what Superman or Clark Kent might wear in the evening, knocking back a beer and watching TV. But he, Benton, certainly wasn't lying on his bed in his dress uniform. His dress uniform should be hanging in the closet, except right now it was in the hands of the consulate, while they tried to decide if a dry cleaner could restore it to glory, or whether they would have to go to the expense of a whole new suit.

So what was he, now? When Clark Kent sat on the sofa was he Superman, or Clark Kent, or was he – he couldn't remember what Superman's birth name was. Kal El? Whatever it was, was it he who sat on the sofa, not a superhero nor a mild-mannered reporter, but just a man, with worries and loves and hates like anyone else? What was Benton now, stretched out on his bed in his long underwear, the little breeze coming in through the window and touching his hair, the room dim around him and the city sounds drifting up from the street? Perhaps he wasn't an officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police right now. He certainly wasn't presentable as such. He wasn't sure he was Benton Fraser, either; at least, not the Benton Fraser who presented himself to people in public. It was like crawling out of a kind of shell, coming in here and locking the door. He was like a hermit crab, naked and exposed, but fortuitously hidden from the eyes of predators. He couldn't bear to open the door and let anyone see him right now, not even Ray, because if he couldn't tell who he was himself, how was anyone else supposed to do it? He'd have to put a mask on again to let Ray in, even Ray, his best friend in this vast city.

He lifted his head a little and looked down at his body stretching away along the bed. He was just like a hermit crab pulled out of its shell. His body was fit enough, but it looked soft and defenceless in the pale jersey knit of the long underwear. It would look even more odd and defenceless if he took that underwear off. Perhaps he would instantly become more real, and somehow know who he was, if he were naked, but he wasn't sure he wanted to know who he was. He was afraid he was a person who wasn't sure about anything; about leaving his home and coming here, about how he was spending his life, about who he should have chosen to live or die in that awful muddy river with the bus half-wedged in the water, the end of it sticking up above the surging current, and the screams coming from inside.

He got up and padded across the chill floor in his bare feet. He liked it when darkness had fallen outside, when the sky was that deep, translucent blue that seemed to hover in the window frame, and all the sounds outside drifted in. He liked seeing the glints of light from other windows and from the streets below. They weren't quite like the stars. Nothing compared to standing out on a snow plain in the Northern Territories and tilting his neck back and dizzying himself with the incomprehensible hugeness of space above him, pricked with millions of white, cold stars. But there was something comforting in the lights outside in this city. He often felt more alone here than he did on a snow plain with not a human soul for a hundred miles, but the little lights were like seeing a lighthouse from out at sea. Each one meant another person going about their life. Each one meant a person he could nod at in passing or say good morning to or perhaps give help to if they needed it. After all, wasn't giving help to people the basis of all human society?

He left the window and filled the kettle and put it on the stove. He didn't need to turn a light on to make coffee. There was enough light from the window, all that borrowed light from his neighbours outside. So he sparked the gas ring into life and put the kettle back on the hissing flames, took a cup down from a shelf, and spooned granules into it. The kettle rumbled, and then it bubbled, and then the steam forced itself through the whistle and the noise shrieked into the air. It felt so loud that he took it off quickly, feeling as if it would betray his presence even though Ray had gone away. He stirred the water through the granules and took the cup back to the window, and sat there, just looking out.

It was like a hive, really. There were always people moving about, performing their parts of the social dance, earning money and gathering food. He listened to the shouts and the quieter talking of people in the street. He listened to the whoop of a siren and forced himself to stay still, instead of craning to see where it was and if he could help. He was so unbearably tired of helping, and unbearably guilty about feeling so tired. He drank his coffee and kept his gaze close to home, and there was no one out there that he needed to run down the fire escape to help.

((O))

Later he went back to his bed and lay back on the mattress again, looking at the ceiling. It was hard to see now. There were still artificial lights shining outside but they couldn't compare with the sun, and it was too far down now to light much of the room. It didn't matter. He looked up into the dimness above him and thought how the water in that river had looked. It had been brown with mud and silt, dark with it, and flowing so fast. There had been a little moment when the bus had gone into the river when the water had been up over the windows, and it had been like being in a weird aquarium, staring at that filthy water pushed up against the glass. There hadn't been a sign of anything living in there. He hadn't sat and stared at that water. He had been on his feet, getting towards the emergency exit, trying to crank the door open against the weight of the flood. It had taken so much strength, and then the water had been surging in, a sudden, terrible, freezing rush. The screaming had suddenly increased, and then fallen silent.

He wished there had been time to organise people, to get them ready to exit the bus. It was hard organising people at the best of times, let alone when most of them were in a blind panic. He had stood there, waist deep in water, with it coming fast higher and higher around him, and he had grabbed the closest person to him and shouted, 'Out, now!'

But there had only been two before the water had come right up to the top of the door, and he had been left underwater, desperately trying to see through the haze, trying to work out where that old woman was, where that toddler in the pushchair was, who to grab and try to help next. Who did you help when the water was all around you and you only had a finite amount of breath, and you couldn't see? He reached blindly for the next body and guided that person out, and then another, and then he had to come out himself, because he couldn't help anyone if he drowned. He had surfaced gasping, blinking water out of his eyes, his hat somehow still on and his clothes heavy and his boots filled with water. So there was another dilemma. Strip off or go straight back down again?

He stared into the dimness in his room. The coffee was keeping him awake. He shouldn't have drunk it, really. He was tired, so tired that his spine ached all down his back, and his head ached in a tight band.

'Never drink caffeine after six p.m., Benton,' his father said in a level voice from the dimness nearby.

Benton exhaled slowly before answering.

'The professional advice is two p.m., I think,' he replied.

'Caffeine before dinner never did anyone any harm,' his father continued, still just a voice somewhere behind him, somewhere on the other side of the room. 'Did I ever tell you about the time I ran a man down outside of Moose Creek, trying to steal a man's prize saddleback pigs? Caffeine. That was what did it, Benton. I'd had six cups of coffee that morning and not a morsel to eat. Should have been faint with hunger, but I got on that man's trail sometime around ten in the morning, tracked him for sixteen miles through the snow. I could hear those pigs squealing four miles away. Sound carries well in the snow. So I came up behind him not far past the bend in the river, and there he was, trying to get those hogs into a canoe – '

'Dad, you're hallucinating,' Benton said tersely. 'You didn't ever run down a man who was trying to fill a canoe with stolen pigs. What kind of man would try to load loose pigs into a canoe?'

'A desperate thief, that's who,' his father said, coming a little closer, his voice warming and strengthening as if he were coming more into reality. 'Five pigs. Or pugs. Maybe it was pugs, Benton. It could be that the man was a dog breeder. Prize pugs, five of them all on leashes, dragging them off the river bank into that canoe. Yes, it was pugs, I'm sure of it, Benton. Well, I came up behind him. He had no idea I was there, the dogs were barking so much. I had hold of his collar before he saw me, turned him around, pushed him down flat on the snow. Five dogs all trying to lick him to death, Benton. It was that that made him surrender, not anything I did.'

'You're crazed,' Benton said dismissively. 'Death has done something to your mind.'

'Six cups of coffee and not a morsel to eat.' He could see him now, standing at the end of the bed, dressed for winter with a fur hat and thick coat and moose skin boots. 'I was on fire, Benton. I didn't eat until eleven o'clock that night, when I brought that man into town and locked him up.'

'You're insane,' Benton muttered. 'Dad, why are you here?'

His father stood there and looked him up and down. 'I've come to talk to you, son. You look as if you need a talking to, lying there in your underwear, all day without shaving, nothing in your stomach.'

'I've eaten, Dad,' Benton reassured him. He rubbed the palm of his hand against his chin. 'I haven't shaved, but I haven't been out of the apartment all day. I didn't need to shave.'

'Well, get up and put your clothes on, son. We're going for a walk,' his father said.

Benton lay there and blinked at him. 'I don't want to go for a walk.'

'Don't let me hear any defeatist talk like that. Come on. Put on an extra shirt, and don't forget your gloves. It's cold out there.'

He glanced at the window. 'It's not that cold.'

'Ah, but we're not going there.'

Benton sighed, sitting up on the bed and flexing his spine. The trouble with being haunted – if that was what was happening – was that a person was almost powerless to do anything about it. He could try to reason with his father. He could try to ignore him. He could talk to him and hope he would go away. None of those things actually made an impression on his father, though. He was always there whenever he wanted to be.

'All right, I'll humour you,' he said, getting up and going over to his wardrobe and browsing through the few items of clothing in there. He already had on his long underwear, so he chose a thick plaid shirt and a jacket, sturdy jeans, and a coat to wear over the top. He pulled on socks and fleece-lined boots and fur lined gloves, and felt ridiculously overdressed for autumn at this latitude.

'All right, I'm ready. Where are we going?'

His father walked around the apartment slowly, peering into cupboards, kneeling to look under the bed, putting his head round the doorpost into the toilet.

'Dad?' Benton asked him impatiently.

'Hold your horses, Benton,' his father told him with a wave of his hand. 'I just need to find – Ah, of course. This will be it.'

He stopped in front of the wardrobe from which Benton had just taken his clothes.

'Would you open that for me, son?' he asked, gesturing at the doors.

'My wardrobe?'

'Open the door for me, will you? That's it,' he said as Benton reached around to open the doors. 'There, just push those clothes aside. Ah, there we are.'

He stood looking into the wardrobe in satisfaction, and Benton peered in too. He hardly felt surprised to see that the back of the wardrobe was open onto a great, dark, snow-covered wilderness.

'You've been reading C. S. Lewis in the afterlife?' he asked sardonically.

'You could do worse, son. You could do a lot worse,' his father said. He gestured at the snow beyond. 'Well, go on, Benton. You're letting the cold in.'

Benton sighed. He ducked his head and stepped through into the wardrobe and out through the back. The hollow sound of the wood underfoot turned to the crunch of snow, and the cold hit him like a douche. It never ceased to amaze him how _real_ these delusions or hallucinations or shared moments in the afterlife felt to him. It was no different to stepping out of the door of his father's cabin on a crisp October night.

'Come on, son,' his father said.

He turned. He hadn't noticed his father coming through the wardrobe, but there he was, standing in the snow, his breath clouding in the freezing air. It was a beautiful, perfect Arctic night, the sky a great arc of blue-black, pricked with cold, glittering stars.

'We've got a way to go,' his father told him.

Benton looked around himself, at the spreading snow, the distant pine trees, the back of the wardrobe standing oddly behind him, with his clothes hanging from the rail and the door just a crack open, showing a sliver of his apartment beyond. He shrugged.

'Okay,' he said.

'Here,' his father said, handing him a pair of traditional snowshoes with rawhide lacing. Benton strapped them on, and followed his father out across the snow.

((O))

'Would you mind telling me where we're going?' Benton asked some time later.

They had been walking for half an hour across the snow. He was warm inside his clothes but his cheeks and nose were freezing, and his lungs felt raw.

His father stopped and looked around, surprised. Benton wondered where all the light was coming from, because he could see his father's facial expressions quite clearly. There was a moon, perhaps, reflecting light from the snow. He looked and saw it there, despite having not noticed it at all before. It was a half moon, brightly brilliant, like a polished slice of platinum in the sky. The stars looked so cold and distant, so piercingly bright above him. The world was hyper-real.

'Going?' his father asked.

'Yes, going. You said we've got a way to go. Where are we going?'

His father shrugged. 'We're going for a walk, son. I thought you liked walking at night. You don't see much clean snow in that city you live in, do you? It's better to walk somewhere like this than around streets filled with garbage and criminals, isn't it?'

'Well, I suppose it is,' Benton acknowledged. 'But I thought we were going somewhere.'

'Just for a walk, son. Clear your head. I've been watching you. You're clearly unhappy about something, so I thought we could go for a walk and talk it out, just like we used to when – '

'We _never_ went for walks to talk things out when I was a boy, dad,' Benton interrupted with a kind of resigned weariness. 'You know that. You were always gone. When I went for walks I went on my own. I talked with my grandparents if I talked to anyone.'

'Well, is it too late to set things right?' his father asked, with a sudden flicker of self-awareness that startled Benton. He was used to his father being entirely self-absorbed, especially in death.

Benton huffed in breath and exhaled slowly. He watched the moisture in his breath condense into tiny pearls and hang in the air. It was so still out here that the little cloud hardly moved at all.

'No, dad,' he said. 'Let's walk, then.'

His father clapped a hand onto his shoulder, and they walked on. Behind them, their footsteps stretched out in a diminishing line across the snow. Far away, the wardrobe was a dark little rectangle against the lighter snow behind.

'I know you're upset about that incident with the bus,' his father said eventually.

Benton felt himself prickling. He didn't want to talk about it with Ray. He didn't want to talk about it with his father. He wanted to forget it, except of course he couldn't forget it, so all he did was lie on his bed thinking about it over and over and over, analysing every moment, trying to work out what he could have done differently.

'Forty people died, dad,' he said after a long silence. 'Forty people. I was on that bus. I should have – '

'You should have got people out as quickly as possible? You should have pulled off your jacket and boots and gone back down there and pulled out everyone you could? You should have given them artificial respiration until they started breathing again? You did all that, son.'

'No,' he said slowly. He shook his head. 'No, I gave one woman artificial respiration, and she didn't start breathing again. She died underneath me. And another woman died because I chose to help the woman who wouldn't survive, instead of the one who might.'

'Did someone give you a crystal ball before that bus went off the bridge?' his father asked him, looking at him with his head cocked on one side. 'Did you look at a list showing you the physical health of every passenger?'

He drew in a shuddering breath. 'Anyone could have known that the thirty nine year old had a better chance of survival than the eighty four year old, dad. It didn't take a medical report to see that.'

'Benton, I once had to give mouth to mouth to a caribou,' his father began.

'_No_, dad,' Benton cut across him impatiently. 'I don't need to hear stories about your giving the kiss of life to a caribou. It's not the same as a human being.'

'It was the same to the caribou,' his father murmured in a rather hurt tone. Then he said, 'Well, I was in less populated climes, son. Look around you. This was my territory. I didn't have buses full of people to worry about. Not so often, anyway. If you will go and live in a city – '

'I _went_ there to investigate your murder,' Benton reminded him.

'And it's always appreciated, son. Always appreciated. But I've seen death too. I lost your mother, Benton. Don't forget that.'

The mention of his mother's death always felt like a quick little stab of a knife inside him. It was like the blade going in quickly, but then staying and twisting a little, reminding him of how much things could hurt, before he managed to push it away again and pretend it wasn't there.

'All right,' he said, because it seemed like the only way to divert his father from talking about things he wanted to hear even less than talk about the bus crash. 'All right, I'm full up with guilt, dad. I'm guilty because I should have seen that the driver was sick. I'm guilty because I didn't get to the wheel in time to turn it away from the edge of the bridge.'

'It's not your fault the parapet was weak,' his father pointed out.

'No,' Benton sighed.

That bridge was over fifty years old, and it was the first time he had ever been over it. He couldn't have done anything about the fact that the parapet was weak. He couldn't have done anything about the driver's heart attack, really. Certainly couldn't have got down to the driver's seat in time and steered away from the edge. Couldn't have stopped the decades of interference in the natural course of the river so that the water didn't sluice down like a wild thing in times of flood.

His father's arm settled around his shoulders. He wondered about that heavy weight, the weight of the arm of a man who was dead and gone. Was this all in his mind? Anyway, his father's arm was there, heavy across his shoulders, an unspeakably perfect reassurance that he wasn't all alone. This was all bizarrely real; the crispness of the snow, the cold in his nostrils, the weight of his father's arm.

'Look, son,' his father said.

Benton looked up, and saw the aurora borealis swaying across the sky. The bands flickered in greens and ambers and purple, hyper-real and incredible, pulsing across the face of the stars.

'That's bigger than all of us,' his father said. 'You can't climb up there and stop the solar winds. Even Superman couldn't do that.'

His heart felt a size too big for his chest, so swollen and hard that it hurt. It pressed at his throat, and ached. He thought of blue, de-oxygenated lips. He thought of the dead bodies that had been pulled out by the emergency workers, laid out in a row on the river bank. All those lives that had been going on as if nothing were wrong, and then suddenly ended. It was so much that it made his heart feel as if it were splitting apart.

'Let's go home, son,' his father said to him. 'You haven't got the boots for these latitudes. I think you're getting a cold.'

((O))

He was lying on his bed in his winter wear, plaid shirt and jeans still on over his long underwear, his boots and jacket and gloves lying on the floor. He was looking up at the ceiling above him in the darkness, where those creases were invisible now, remembering the swirl and pulse of the aurora in a sky that had looked as real as the room was around him. Instead of the crisp, clean cold of open snowfields, there was the slight smell of damp and city exhaust fumes and cooking smells, but he swore every now and then he caught a breath of fresh air from the partly open wardrobe doors.

Dief had come back, and was lying on the floor by the bed, huffing. Tonight, he didn't feel like giving up his bed to the dog. Didn't he deserve to lie on his own bed, sometimes?

There were noises on the fire escape. That wasn't too unusual. People used it more than they should; kids sneaking home, lovers sneaking out, thieves looking for a slightly open window or a broken catch.

He put his hand on his sheath knife and withdrew the blade. He didn't expect to need to stab someone, but it was good to be prepared. The scuffling was coming closer, metallic clangs that implied the intruder had no thought for people sleeping in the building, huffs and sighs that implied he was less than pleased to be here.

He put his knife back in the sheath.

Ray came over the windowsill a couple of minutes later, lugging some kind of bag, swearing liberally.

'Do you even have light bulbs in this place? Any chance of letting me see my way around here?'

Benton reached out and switched on the tired little lamp he had next to his bed. The glow was soft and warm, not dazzling. He could see Ray as a silhouette on the other side of the room.

'Most people use the stairs,' he commented blandly.

'Most people use the goddamn elevator, because most people live in apartment buildings where at least someone gives a damn, and the elevator isn't left broken for months. Most people answer their door when someone knocks, Benny.'

Ray put his bag down on the floor with an odd, heavy clank.

'Do you know what it's like carrying a casserole dish up that many flights of a fire escape?'

Benton sat up slowly. His interest was piqued.

'Ray, why did you carry a casserole dish up the fire escape?'

'Because I told mom what was going on when I gave her the ground beef, and now I'm climbing up fire escapes with spaghetti and meatballs, because apparently that's what friends do.'

Benton smiled. 'I appreciate it, Ray,' he said, and he meant it.

Ray crossed the room to turn on the main light, then started unpacking the bag onto the table. A bouquet of flowers came out first, slightly battered. Then there were plastic picnic plates and cutlery, 'Because I'm damned if I know if you've got crockery and flatware or if you've given them to a needy neighbour,' Ray said irritably.

Then there was a cast iron pot that must have been hell to carry, the lid tied on with string.

'I thought you had a date, Ray?' Ben asked.

'I cancelled,' Ray said shortly. 'I mean, I cancelled once already tonight, then I called her up and told her I could make it after all, and she was pissed, but she said yes. And then I cancelled again, so I guess if I ever run into her again she'll probably shoot me. And she was _hot_, Benny. I mean, _hot_. We were going to have dinner, a spot of dancing, then – well, who knows? God. I could have been making love in a little apartment somewhere right now...'

'Then why did you come?' Benton asked.

Ray sighed. 'Because I'm your friend, Ben. Look. Here.'

He picked up the bouquet of flowers and presented them to Benton. He took them, uncertain what to do.

'Do you even own a vase?' Ray asked.

'I – er – '

Ben looked at his cupboards, thought, then opened one and took out an old glass jug. He filled it with water and started arranging the flowers in it to show them at their best. There were roses, lilies, and lisianthus all clustered together.

'You didn't buy these for your date?' he asked doubtfully, tweaking one of the roses so it sat better among the other flowers. He had a talent for flower arranging that he didn't often get to indulge.

'I didn't buy them at all,' Ray said bluntly. 'Someone left them at the station for you. Daughter of that old lady who died in the crash. There's a card, I think.'

Benton felt an odd little spear of pain in his chest, but he looked in the cellophane and tissue wrappings and found the card.

'To the Mountie. Thank you for doing everything you could for mom.'

He felt his throat swell. He laid the card down again.

'That's nice,' he said. He couldn't think what else to say. 'Did she leave an address?'

'No,' Ray said. 'Just the flowers.'

He rummaged in Benton's cutlery drawer, found salad servers, and started ladling out spaghetti and meatballs. There was still steam rising from the food.

'Sit down,' he said. 'Eat. If you don't, mom'll probably make me sleep on the porch.'

Benton sat, and ate. The flowers sat on the table between them, for all the world as if they were on a date together. He suddenly felt viciously hungry, and the food was good. Ray brought a bottle of red wine out from the bag and poured some into two china mugs. He pushed one over the table to Ben, then lifted his own in a toast. Benton clinked his mug into Ray's almost automatically, and drank. He didn't like red wine much, but it was polite to drink.

'You're not Superman, Benny,' Ray said after a while.

Benton quirked a little smile at the corner of his mouth.

'People keep saying that.'

'Well, you should listen,' Ray said firmly. 'You're not. Wearing that red suit doesn't give you special powers. You're just like the rest of us. Human.'

'Yes, I know,' Ben said.

Could he really expect to be any more than a normal human being? There was a muted little disappointment in not being superhuman. As a child he had read so much, and he had wished that perhaps he could be one of the special ones; that perhaps he would be able to fly, move things with his mind, have a superhuman strength. It hadn't happened, though. He had just carried on growing up, human as the next boy, fallible as the next boy.

'You need to be able to move on,' Ray said with his fork halfway to his mouth. 'Bad things happen. You move on. In this kind of job – '

'Yes, I know,' Benton said again, because he had been in this kind of job for as long as Ray had, even if they had started out in such different arenas.

'Humans need to eat, they need to sleep, they need to drink, they need to have sex,' Ray continued.

Ben looked up with mild amusement at the emphasis Ray had put on that last part. He didn't really find he needed sex that much. Sometimes it was a dull ache, and then it went away. Ray would be rankling over the missed opportunity with his date for weeks.

'I'm eating,' Ben said, tapping his plastic fork on the edge of the plastic plate. 'Drinking too.'

'Yeah, you are now,' Ray acknowledged. 'But don't try to be Superman, Benny. Okay? Just don't try to be Superman. You'll tear yourself apart.'

'I know,' Ben said.

He did know that. He felt better with the food in him. He felt better with that little edge just blunted off by the alcohol in the wine. He felt better for Ray's company. He should have opened the door to him before. He would feel bad about that crash for a long time. There wasn't a lot he could do about that. But he should have opened his door to Ray and let him come in and talk. It was what friends did.

'Will you be all right, Benny?' Ray asked, looking up, and for a moment all his front was utterly gone. It was just Ray, with no veneer.

'Yeah,' Benton said with a little smile. 'Yes, I'll be all right.'

He coughed, and pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket to press it to his nose.

'You're getting a cold,' Ray said.

'Dad said the same,' Benton murmured, and Ray gave him a curious look. 'Maybe I am,' he said, to cover the moment. 'I'm not Superman, after all, Ray. I'm allowed to catch a cold.'

Ray dug into his meatballs again. 'Well, just don't expect me to nurse you,' he said.

'I won't,' Benton promised.

'And don't go standing outside the Consulate for a ten hour shift. Call in sick. You'll get pneumonia.'

'It's not ten – ' Ben began, but it wasn't the details of his shifts that mattered. It was Ray's concern. 'I won't,' he said. 'I'll call in sick.'

Ray nodded in satisfaction. 'Good,' he said.

'Your mom won't make you sleep on the porch, then?' Benton asked with a little smile, and Ray shook his head. 'You can sleep here, if you like?'

Ray looked over his shoulder at the sparse room behind him, arching his eyebrows.

'Nah, you're okay, Benny. I don't think she'll make me sleep on the porch.' He counted off on his fingers. 'Make sure he eats. Make sure he doesn't get sick. Make sure he sleeps. That's two out of three, and I'll tuck you up in bed before I go, okay? I can't do more than that.'

'I don't need more than that,' Benton said.

He didn't want more than that. The guilt was still there, but it felt easier, as if he were carrying it with a friend instead of on his own. It would keep getting easier. Even Superman felt guilt, he was sure. He was stronger and faster and tougher, but he wasn't immune to getting things wrong. Maybe he sat down with Lois Lane or Jimmy in the evening and just talked things over, and then he felt better. Maybe he went back to work the next day with his costume under his clothes, and waiting for something to happen, so he could try to do better next time. Maybe that was all a man could aim for; to do better next time.

Ray refilled the mugs with wine again, and raised his towards his friend.

'To being human.'

Benton echoed the gesture with his own cup.

'To being human,' he said.


End file.
